On the removal of all, towards abstraction, and right before

I have been reading the 'Hymn to Liberty' of Solomos for quite some time now and I think that the time has come that I acknowledge what is one of the most fabulous verses written in the history of Greek Poetry. I will refer to this technique as 'the removal of all, towards abstraction, and right before' and I will shortly explain why.

Dionysios Solomos is clearly never taken lightly; he is our national poet afterall but this does little to refresh one's memory on the vastness of beauty contained within his poems.

If you take the 'Hymn to Liberty' then one also quickly forgets that the entire poem refers, one way or another, to liberty. Sometime the visibility of such a confrontation is surprisingly elusive but it should not be taken for anything else. An exemplar of this is the verse that has become the purpose of this blog and one that displays this technique in all of its majesty (a comforting thought however is that Solomos would not have seen it as a technique - but as an inspiration).

On the removal of all, towards abstraction, and right before. The poetic removal of all possible states in a reference space (if for instance the reference space is the world then one can remove one by one the reference points of the world), followed by recognition of such an abstraction, and then followed by the careful grounded placement of an immediate (or intermediate) concept which returns one step back and right before the abstraction. In the following, the reference point is the world, the abstraction is everything, and the step before the abstraction is Liberty that is not explicitly referred to but nevertheless, becomes evident.

In Greek:

"Ουρανός γι' αυτούς δεν είναι,
ουδέ πέλαγο, ουδέ γη,
γι' αυτούς όλους το παν είναι
μαζωμένο αντάμα εκεί."

Από τον Ύμνο εις την Ελευθερίαν του Διονυσίου Σολωμού.